Does city council hail from Mars?

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Some days you wonder if certain members of city council aren’t from Calgary at all.

Maybe they’ve recently arrived from Mars. It could help explain actions inexplicable to many regular folk.

Put aside the ongoing shenanigans involving our busted-at-their-seams water pipes, the endlessly shrinking boondoggle this Green Line transit system has become and council’s tone-deaf attitude toward citizens who don’t want to see that cute, next-door bungalow transformed into some hulking fourplex.

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Instead, consider the regular shellacking homes in Calgary — usually in the northeast quadrant — receive from a barrage of huge hailstones whenever those high-summer thunderclouds erupt overhead.

Why that particular part of Calgary bears the brunt of these storms is a question for weather experts. Maybe there’s some strange microclimate in play, because such events rarely bother neighbourhoods in the south.

This latest storm came a week ago, but the resulting images of battered vinyl siding were eerily similar to those from 2020 when a hailstorm caused more than a billion dollars of damage.

Hailstorm in Calgary
Harsimran Singh inspects hail damage to his car in the northeast community of Redstone on Tuesday. Behind him, the siding on his neighbour’s house was shredded by hail during Monday’s storm. Jim Wells/Postmedia

So why is nothing done? Didn’t the mayor declare this a climate emergency city almost three years ago? Isn’t hail part of the Prairie climate, and doesn’t massive, regular destruction fall under an emergency banner?

Instead we get endless grandstanding and pious halo polishing by a certain bevy of councillors.

Look no further than the recent nonsense involving paper bags and reusable straws. It’s as though council has nothing better to do than come up with ludicrous bylaw suggestions to make life miserable for retailers and customers alike, justifying blatant nonsense by claiming it’s somehow good for the planet.

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Thankfully, there remained enough councillors to put a decisive stake through that particular lunacy.

Civic administration might be worse. They suggested we axe Canada Day fireworks because of the environmental damage; though they also saw such family fun as a slight upon Calgarians of Chinese heritage, even though China is justifiably proud to have invented fireworks. That stupidity died, too, snuffed out by the bracing air of common sense.

Yet today, as northeast homeowners survey damage while the rest of us hold our breath, waiting for the next huge jump in annual home insurance, all we’ll get from city hall is the usual blather in asking the province to bail out these folk by picking up the damage tab.

It can’t do that. It would be repeating the mistake of bailing out those whose homes burned down because they built in a forest, or were washed away because they liked that waterfront view. And then watched as those people took that public cash and rebuilt on the very same spot.

(If the government would always pay up, why buy insurance?)

Instead of sitting back and whining for compensation from elsewhere, council should engage in what it was elected for — deal with the pressing issue of inadequate building codes allowing unsuitable vinyl siding to wrap Calgary homes. If that doesn’t fall under Gondek’s emergency city declaration, then heaven knows what does.

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We can’t reinvent the past, but we can deal with the future and ensure new homes are not built in such a manner (Hint: it’s done because it’s cheap). And, yes, press other levels of government for grants and loans to encourage replacement of current coverings.

Isn’t this what council’s supposed to deal with?

This big, pressing issue will be solved only if the will power is there and it stops wasting time, money and energy on lunacies such as paper bag bylaws or imagining the construction of underground transit tunnels through our downtown flood plain.

Wake up. Or find a flight back to Mars.

Maybe it doesn’t hail there.

Chris Nelson is a regular columnist.

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